We have seen various ways to enhance JIRA functionality in the previous chapters, but how do we communicate with JIRA from another application? What are the various methods of integrating third-party applications with JIRA? Or, in simple words, how does JIRA expose its functionalities to the outside world?
JIRA used to expose its functionalities via REST, SOAP, or XML/RPC interfaces. But in JIRA7, SOAP and XML/RPC interfaces are removed, after giving enough notice to developers, and hence we need to use REST APIs for remote communication. If you have existing integrations that use the SOAP or XML/RPC APIs, they need to be migrated to REST API calls.
Not all the JIRA functionality is exposed via the REST interface but JIRA also lets us extend them. In this chapter, we will learn how to communicate with JIRA using REST APIs and add how to expose more functionality via REST with the help of plugins.
This chapter covers only a few examples and should not be treated as the final list...